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What’s the point of paracetamol?

General Research

Paracetamol has been around for over 50 years. It’s safe and many guidelines recommend it as the go-to treatment. At least, that’s the conventional view of the drug. It’s a view so ingrained that it’s rarely questioned. The trouble is that the conventional view is probably wrong.

Huge amounts of paracetamol are used to treat pain, measured not in how many tablets are used but in the thousands of tons. For the UK, an estimate of the amount of paracetamol sold is just under 6,300 tonnes a year. That’s 35 tonnes per million of population: 35 grams or 70 paracetamol tablets each, every year.

Read the full article on The Conversation website, written by Andrew Moore.

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